Grocery Fraud: How Supermarkets Cheat Customers with Fake Foods

Food detective and author Larry Olmsted explains how even the most common foods in your grocery aisle are subject to dubious claims.

Jackson Connor

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In New York City, there seems to be a new scam lurking around every corner. From the counterfeit Rolexes and faux Louis Vuitton handbags peddled on Canal Street, to the fake gemstones and phony diamond earrings hawked on 47th, there is often the overwhelming feeling of the wool being pulled firmly over one’s eyes.

But in a city that takes such extreme pride in its food—boasting tens of thousands of restaurants, markets, and bodegas across some 300-square-miles—the grocery store has historically been sacrosanct to New Yorkers, the lifeblood of the five boroughs.

The concept of “fake food” has existed for centuries, although in recent years, scandals of festering meat in China and wood shavings hidden in parmesan cheese have grabbed major headlines. Olmsted’s book, however, sheds new light on the often subtle and insidious ways food manufactures mislead the public in search of profits. “The more I found out, the more upset I got,” Olmsted tells me. Donning a checkered button down and a pair of dark, horn-rimmed glasses, he rummages the market’s shelves almost giddily, turning over labels like a detective searching for clues. “I wrote this article for Forbes [in 2012] about “the Great Kobe Beef Lie.” If you go into a fancy steakhouse, and pay $200 and think you’re getting Japanese steak, you are not. There’s not any available in the United States at all.”

Though today nine restaurants in the U.S. now serve real Kobe beef, hundreds more claim to serve the rare Japanese meat on their menus. The response to Olmsted’s article was visceral, with thousands of angry restaurant-goers reacting to the piece online, and the writer began to dig deeper into the dark world of food fraud.

“If people are so pissed off about this issue, what if the staples were faked, too?” Olmsted thought. “I just started researching and found out how prevalent food fraud is. Food fraud is two levels: one is adulteration, and then one is sort of faking the consumer out, like with the Kobe beef story. And it’s prevalent. It’s across every kind of food.”

During our hour-long scavenger hunt through a local New York supermarket, Olmsted pointed out the myriad ways in which food companies skirt laws, dupe consumers, and line their pockets. From misleading labels to hidden ingredients, these are the biggest traps to watch out for while shopping at the grocery store.

Field-grown tomatoes are basically painted red.

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Olmsted says: A lot of supermarkets now use “hot house tomatoes.” In the abstract, you would think field-grown sounds better than hot house-grown if they were under a sign. It’s not. Field-grown tomatoes are picked green, and they’re 95 percent of the tomatoes we eat. In any kind of agriculture, you as a farmer want to get the vegetable off the vine as quickly as possible, because every day it’s out there it’s a liability. Bugs could eat it, you could have a hailstorm, whatever. So they pick the tomatoes green and they ship them to distribution centers.

When they run out at a supermarket they say, “Hey, we need some more tomatoes,” and over at the warehouse they take a load of these green tomatoes, which are just sitting there because they have a long shelf life, and they hit them with gas. I think it’s carbon dioxide, or maybe it’s ethylene. It’s a harmless gas, it’s been approved for food use. What that does is it triggers a reddening response from the tomato. The tomato turns red, but it doesn’t ripen. It’s a little bit softer, but essentially it’s like painting the tomato red with gas. That’s why supermarket tomatoes are usually rock-hard.

Big Poultry's “no hormones" guarantee is a scam.

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Olmsted says: In beef production, you’re allowed to use steroids, hormones, antibiotics, and growth promotants. In pork and poultry in the United States, you’re allowed to use antibiotics, but you’re not allowed to use hormones. A lot of chicken producers have realized that if they slap “no hormones added” on the chicken, they can sell it for a few cents a pound more and people will buy it, even though there’s no hormones in any chicken.

This chicken (pictured above) is a little bit different because it’s also antibiotic free, which is exceptional, but then it says “no steroids or hormones added,” which they’re not allowed to use anyway. Do you see that little asterisk? It says here: “Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones or steroids in poultry.” The USDA made them add that because they think this is misleading. To me, it’s like if you bought a bottle of water and it said, “No Coca-Cola.” It just can’t be in there.

It’s not made in Japan, but there are domestic producers of Wagyu that have imported the bloodlines from Japan and raised them. You can buy pretty good quality Japanese-style beef in the United States. This is not it. I talk about this brand in particular in the book because you can go to their website and read about what they use, and it’s not that 100 percent Japanese bloodline. I think at some point they strayed a little bit in; it’s called “Wangus” in the industry where they cross-breed a Wagyu with an Angus.

This is $6.49 a pound. [Real Kobe beef], the cheapest, at whole sale, is $12 an ounce. And they don’t make burgers out of it, because it’s too fatty. If you ask chefs, they all agree on what the ideal fat content should be for burger. I forget what it is exactly, but it’s a five percent span, and Japanese Wagyu is way too fatty for that—and too expensive. Even places that have a $50 Kobe burger on the menu, you don’t see that in Japan because it won’t make a good burger.

San Marzano tomatoes rarely come from Italy.

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Olmsted says: San Marzano tomatoes from Italy are considered the best sauce tomatoes in the world, and they grow in the volcanic soil leftover from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompei. And it’s a PDO product, which means it’s protected under European law for coming from a certain place, like Champagne is. San Marzano tomatoes in Italy, in Europe, and almost all of the rest of the world can only be called San Marzano tomatoes if they’re grown in this region of volcanic soil. This label [points to a can] at least says “style,” which is a big buzz word. I encourage this because you look at “San Marzano-style” and you understand, “No, they’re trying to imitate that, but it’s not the real thing.” So I’m totally fine with that. A lot of them will actually say it, and even have pictures of Italian flags on the label.

A big California manufacturer of sort of fake San Marzano tomatoes just agreed to change their label and they’re going to call them “San Merican.” With real San Marzano tomatoes, European law regulates not just the tomato, but how it can be packaged. In cans, I think a lot of them add salt and maybe a little olive oil, but nothing else. This one says citric acid, potassium chloride, which you not find in real San Marzano tomatoes.

There's no way all that olive oil is acutally “extra virgin."

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Olmsted says: The problem with extra virgin olive oil is that a number of tests and investigations of supermarket brands show that they don’t meet the legal standard for extra virgin. There’s extra virgin, virgin, and then there’s just olive oil, and extra virgin is like the A+. A lot of experts I talked to said maybe eight to 10 percent of the olive oil made should be extra virgin, like ultra-premium gasoline for your car.

You probably can’t find one these bottles that doesn’t say extra virgin. You can sometimes find them in Europe, because people will say, “I cook with that. It’s cheaper.” But it’s very hard to find it here not labeled extra virgin, and if you do you should not buy it.

One thing you also really want to avoid is “light” olive oil or blends, which they will have here. [This one says,] “Extra-light tasting olive oil.” They actually changed this, because in the industry, light olive oil is light in flavor, not lower in calories. It used to not even say “light tasting,” but when they do consumer perception tests, people think it’s lower in calories. I’m not saying, “Don’t buy this, it’s horrible.” I’m saying, “Don’t buy this if you think it’s less calories, and don’t buy it if you’re looking for extra virgin olive oil.” It’s neither of those things.

Fruit juice is rarely what it seems.

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Olmsted says: Here is a pomegranate blueberry fruit juice beverage, which would lead you to believe that it was made from pomegranate or blueberry juice, right? Pomegranate juice, by the way, is the most expensive commercial juice, so when you see pomegranate blueberry, they always put the pomegranate first because that’s really valuable. You know that company, POM? They actually make 100 percent pomegranate juice. They sued another juice brand that was owned by Coca-Cola, saying it was misleading. Not this particular brand, but the same label: “pomegranate blueberry.” It went all the way to the Supreme Court because Coca-Cola’s position was, ‘This is legal what we’re doing.’ Because the [label on the front of the bottle] does not have to be in any order or inclusive, whereas [the label on the back] does have to list every ingredient and in order of volume.

So this one has water as the first ingredient, which you don’t have in orange juice. Sugar is the second. Next is concentrated pear juice, which is a cheap juice. Next is concentrated apple juice. Almost all juice blends you buy in the U.S. are primarily apple juice and white grape juice. They’re cheap, and almost all of our concentrated apple juice—like 97 percent of it—comes from China, and they use a lot banned pesticides.

Anyways, next [on the label] you get concentrated pomegranate juice, which is actually ahead of blueberry juice, and a little bit surprising. It’s listed by volume of the overall product. There’s more water than there’s anything else. Then there’s more sugar. Then there’s more pear juice. Then there’s more apple juice. And this is very, very typical.

In that suit that POM had, the Coca-Cola product that was called “pomegranate blueberry,” the first two ingredients were white grape and apple, and it was 0.3 percent pomegranate—some trace amount so they could put it on the label. But you, as a consumer, would probably think those are the two juices you’re buying.

Always buy whole-bean coffee.

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Olmsted says: Coffee is consistently in the top 10 most adulterated products in the world. It’s one of these things where once you grind it, really you can’t tell [what’s in it.] In the old days they used to [cut it with] parchment paper, but most recently they’ve tested coffee for acorns, roasted corn, and sawdust—anything that’s sort of brown that you can grind into powder. That’s why I say to always buy whole bean coffee. The beauty of whole bean coffee is you know exactly what it is. They can’t paint pinto beans and sell them to you, right?

Still, you don’t know whether you’re really buying Jamaican Blue Mountain for $30. You go to a store and there are eight open barrels, and they all have different prices and different signs, but they all look exactly the same. Maybe one’s a shade darker, but if you’re not in the coffee business you don’t know what color the beans from Nicaragua are supposed to look like. The good news is if you buy that Jamaican Blue Mountain and it’s not from Jamaica, but you like it, you know it’s coffee because you’re buying the beans. If you know you like it, there’s very little harm in that. And realistically, nobody’s checking. The FDA is already under-resourced, and they’ve got bigger problems. To them, if you overpay for your coffee and you’re not getting sick, it’s not a high-priority problem.

Grated cheese doesn't contain sawdust, but the ingredients aren't that much better.

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Olmsted says: Here’s some grated cheese. It doesn’t even have to be refrigerated. You alluded to the wood pulp, and that was a big scandal earlier this year. Bloomberg reported it, it got picked up a lot, and then Inside Edition did [an exposé]. I don’t like to use “wood pulp.” It’s sensationalist. It’s cellulose, which is a plant fiber product. It’s not milk, it shouldn’t be in cheese, but they made it seem like they were sweeping sawdust in. Cellulose is approved for human consumption. And the FDA knew that it was in here.

Everyone was so surprised, like, “Oh my God, they’re putting cellulose in.” They’ve always done it. It’s a shelf stabilizer, because otherwise this would clump up. It serves a purpose, that’s why they originally did it. For things that the FDA doesn’t regulate sometimes they have what they call “recommendations,” which are non-binding. So there recommendation for the grated cheese industry is that you use only the amount of cellulose you need to achieve the purpose, which is not binding. The industry norm for that is two to four percent.

When Inside Edition and Bloomberg tested them, a lot of supermarket brands were four to eight percent. If two percent will get it done, eight percent is a 400 percent increase, and it’s cheaper than cheese. The worst one, and I don’t know what brand it was, had 21 percent. That’s 10 times what you need. And this is crap cheese to begin with.

True truffle oil simply doesn't exist.

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Olmsted says: A big problem right now is truffle oil. It’s one product that’s not even really fake because there’s no real version. Truffle oil is made like perfume; it’s an entirely laboratory product. A lot of it is made from a derivative of formaldehyde. It has no connection to truffles. They look for chemical compounds that, when processed, generate a truffle-like taste.

Most of the chefs I talked to say that truffles don’t—and there’s a scientific word for it—leach. They don't infuse. If you chop up garlic and put it in oil, it flavors the oil. If you chopped up a truffle and put it in a jar of oil, it doesn’t take on the flavor of truffle. Plus truffles are very, very expensive. If you go to a fancy Italian restaurant and they shave black truffle over your risotto, you see it, it’s truffle, you can taste it, it’s really strong. But most of us don't get that. Most Americans who think they’ve had truffles have had truffle fries at their local gastropub or truffle mash potatoes. And there’s a reason why truffles cost 50-plus dollars an ounce or whatever, and truffle oil costs six bucks.

White truffles in the market—real truffles—are two to three times as expensive as black truffles. If you go to a gourmet store and look at the truffle oil, they’ll have white truffle oil and black truffle oil and they’re exactly the same price. It makes no sense. It tastes vaguely like truffles, but it also tastes vaguely like gasoline or petroleum or plastic. We have a whole generation of people who think that’s the taste of truffles, so now it’s really easy to fool them.

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